


excerpts from a life before

by cosmiclattes



Series: excerpts from a life before [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: 14th Century, Action/Adventure, Drama, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Gen, Light Angst, Mystery, Other, Past Relationship(s), Period Typical Attitudes, Plague, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:47:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27210712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmiclattes/pseuds/cosmiclattes
Summary: 14th Century Constantinople — Yusuf and Nicolo have exhausted their search for their fellow immortals in the eastern Mediterranean and look to carry their search on westward. But new disturbing dreams, the looming threat of a mysterious disease, and their own differences threaten to crumble the progress they made.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: excerpts from a life before [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1986544
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

The sky is the color of a bruise when he leaves. 

He looks first, up the street. East. Rain clouds still hang heavy overhead, though the sun is setting them aglow from somewhere on the other side. 

All the previous night, it had rained. And now in the early morning with the orange light filtering through a purple-blue canopy, it made the city look as though it were built in an opal. Yusuf Al-Kaysani doesn’t believe in magic. It’s almost laughably ironic, though. He—given this gift he doesn’t quite understand yet—just doesn’t believe in it. But sunrises like that sometimes looked a bit like it. His train of thought rolls to a halt. It stops somewhere just outside of a memory. One he can’t tell is one of his own, or a dream.

Maybe that morning he met Tazim. 

Or maybe one of _their_ mornings. 

Jerking back to life in a foreign field and blindly reaching for a hand you know would be there, looking for a face with no name...

It’s only as a man driving a cart whistles that he jerks back to the present and steps out of the road.

Nicolo. Right. He had to find Nicolo.

There had been something stormy between them recently. He couldn’t quite name what. Or if it was even something bad necessarily. To be completely honest, there had been something just under the surface when they had first came to Constantinople about a decade prior and their dreams became more frequent.

Yusuf put it off on nerves.

_“They need us,” he said. The wine is thick in his throat. It’s not a reminder. Nicolo knows this. All evening he had been more quiet than usual. Eyes rimmed red and watching the ceiling as though an answer lay just above them._

_ “They’re not here,” the man in question says. “Our only other choice is to look west.” _

_ It’s unspoken. Both of their homes were west. Two hundred years. Yusuf looks at Nicolo, but Nicolo is frowning at his hands now. Laced in his lap. _

_ “I’ll speak with Tazim.” _

They had travelled apart, in their searches, meeting in agreed upon cities here and there. Each decade. Nothing. The rooms they took in Constantinople was the first shared home they had in awhile.

Nearly two hundred years of fruitless searching, Yusuf thinks. And in a months time, they were to leave again.

They were on better terms, at the least. Much better considering the terms only two centuries prior involved them throwing insults and weapons at each other. They still had differences, but these they didn’t settle too much on. How Yusuf took his tea. Where Nicolo left his books. The only real joining thing between them is what brought them together in the first place.

 _And_ , what Yusuf suspects, _what drove Nicolo away this morning._

The tea shop Nicolo frequented sat tucked nearly indistinguishable from the other businesses that lined that avenue. Yusuf only knew it from muscle memory. It was a small place, ran by a man and his daughter. The front of the shop was already filled. No doubt the state of the sky scaring the customers off from taking their drinks and conversations outdoors. Glasses pass hands amid a low murmur, as though to speak too loudly would disrupt whatever little atmosphere the shop worked so hard to create.

Yusuf passes this, stepping into the courtyard and coming short beside a leafy plant. The enclosed patio is nearly empty. Two men sit in deep conversation on the far end.

Nicolo sits just to the side, regarding a cup of amber liquid as though it were speaking to him in riddles.

He looks up when Yusuf approaches.

“I needed some air,” he says by way of explanation. He drags a finger around that cup and brings that hand up to his mouth. “You had that dream too.”

“I did.” The skin at his wrists tingles under the phantom sensation of iron. “It felt different.”

“I think they’re in trouble. The worst kind.”

Yusuf swallows around the lump in his throat and settles across from his companion in silence. There’s a cushion just to the right of Nicolo’s hip. It’s embroidered in a pattern like a peacock feather. He traces the shape with his eyes, and then asks why Nicolo thinks that.

“It’s just a feeling,” the man says. “I don’t...I feel they aren’t safe. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.” Unfortunately, he did.

“I wonder where they are.”

“I can never tell. There’s nothing that I can recognize.”

“Perhaps then, someplace you’ve never been.”

“Or you.”

Nicolo smiles, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Or me.”

For some reason, that gives Yusuf comfort. Though in the grand scheme of things, knowing there were others like them out there that he and Nicolo were grasping at straws to find _wasn’t_ comforting, it took the pin sharp feeling of guilt off his shoulders. Even if by a bit. 

If Niccolo didn’t know and he didn’t know, then nobody knew. Part of him wonders if the women dreamed of them too. If they dreamed of them back then. If they are, now...

Nicolo finishes his tea in one graceless toss and they leave together. The sun is fully emerged as the street slowly fills with the first streams of people. They walk in companionable silence, parting automatically to let a trio of children tear past, pausing to let a man with a wide tray of ceramic step precariously through the opening of a door. They reach their place as the gentle hum of a city awakening turns into the clamor of a city going to work. Yusuf takes refuge in it. Falling back into an anonymity he was used to. Nicolo reaches out and drops a hand on his shoulder, squeezing until he stops.

Coming through the threshold of the door is a familiar figure. Tazim’s clerk. A young man of about seventeen with a brown wool cap and the quick alertness of someone much older. His name was Agapios. His head turns quickly in their direction as they approach and he inclines a head in greeting.

“The gentleman told me you were both away,” Agapios says, motioning vaguely behind him. “I left a note with him for you. From Tazim. I didn’t want to leave it at the door.”

“Is everything well?”

Agapios hesitates. Shifting his weight between his feet. It’s answer enough.

“There’s been...some delay. I don’t know the details. But we may not be able to leave Constantinople so soon after all.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I completely forgot I was even writing this.

The Mese cut along the southern half of the city like a main artery. It was a living thing, always moving and breathing. People moving in tandem, between each other and through each other. A hundred conversations in a hundred different languages. An icon makers stand posted next door to a woodworking guild next door to a jeweler. And so on, traders of varying prestige sat shoulder to shoulder from the palace down towards the port.   


Tazim had rooms just off of this street. In a beautiful building covered in flowering vines, with tall porticoes and an inner courtyard. His neighbor was the owner themself, an elderly widow and her lanky dog. Yusuf and Nicolo pass the woman in question that day, dipping forward in polite greeting. 

She holds a hand up to stop them a moment.

“It is none of my business,” she says. “But I understand Tazim has business in Oran. You will join him? You both?”

“Yes,” Yusuf replies. “We are departing at the end of the month.”

“Be careful,” this spoken in a whisper though it were only the three of them in the breezeway. “I have heard things in passing. Among men of your trade. They are falling ill. Don’t loiter about among just anyone, I know you all like to talk and tell stories.”

Yusuf and Nicolo promise they won’t, and as she leaves them, Nicolo looks to his companion with the smallest pinch between his eyebrows. There is a question there, and Yusuf acknowledges it with a sigh.

“There is always illness when you travel,” he says, waving his hand as though swatting at a fly. “You know that.”

Agapios is in the courtyard when they arrive cleaning out a parrots cage with a wet brush. It was a gift from a friend coming out of India, Tazim had told them. It’s name was Sufjan. The parrot is hopping between his ankles, tethered by the foot with a thin string, the other end attached to a loop in the young man’s belt loop. The bird gives a sharp cry when the men enter, and as though it were talking in fluent Greek, Agapios glances over his shoulder, discarding the brush and bowing deeply.

Yusuf asks if Tazim is available at present.

“He’s been talking with the captain of _The Pearl_ all morning,” Agapios explains. He trails off as though there’s more, but he doesn’t say. Untying the string at his belt and offering the parrot an arm, he leads the pair upstairs to a heavy wooden door and knocks twice.

“Yes? What is it?” Tazim’s muffled voice.

“It is your friends, sir.”

The door opens a minute later revealing an older gentlemen with a salt and pepper beard and the smell of the sea all around him stepping through the threshold with a brief nod at the new company. He shuffles past with the unspoken guilt of a chastised child, descending the stairs quickly and in near silence. Before Yusuf or Nicolo can make any sense of that, Agapios is nudging the door open wider with a foot and Tazim is tugging over a spare chair.

“I’m glad you came when you did,” he says. He settles down and his kaftan envelopes him like a rose in bloom. “We’ve run into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” Nicolo asks.

“The ship I chartered is backing out. No, no, you stay Agapios. You ought to hear this too.”

“What?” Yusuf hisses. “Why?”

“A rumor! That’s how I hear it anyway! These older men are talking things up and scaring the younger ones, and I—I’m stuck in the middle, I suppose...”

“A rumor about what?”

Tazim chews at his lip, waving away the pot of tea Agapios lifts in question and motioning instead at one paper among many across his crowded desk.

“There was...a ship. Coming in. Westward. It’s all in the paper there but...” he trails off, shaking his head. “A crew of thirty five departed. Twenty eight returned.”

“Seven—?”

“They fell ill between here and there,” Tazim shrugs. “But such is our work. It’s true, isn’t it, Yusuf?”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“This happens every now and again. I think nothing of it. I will only have to find someone new, only I am unsure whether we can stick to the timeframe we spoke about...”

Oh.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Tazim says, hands hovering over his desk like he was unsure what to do with them. “But is it urgent that you return to Algeria? It may be awhile...”

“Tazim, you are a good friend. And we’ve been honest with each other this long,” Yusuf replies. “But I don’t think we can find another who can see us to Oran and not take all of our savings in the process.”

Tazim laughs, a heavy rush of air and wags a knowing finger. “You’re an observant man. And very right.”

“Where is the ship now?” Nicolo speaks up.

“The one with the erm...? Yes. It’s docked just out of port. You may be able to see the masts from the hill here.”

When they depart from Tazim, Nicolo asks Yusuf if he had ever heard of that. Of ships being forced to stay away from the port because of a sickness.

“Not in my years, no,” Yusuf confesses.

“Never?”

They walk down the Mese, cutting through a line of fruit trees and taking one of the walking paths up past a row of housing to the closest hill. There is only a small space between the tightly joined buildings and the expanse of the city below. Maybe five feet wide, enough to stand shoulder to shoulder. The short alley ends almost like a balcony. A hedge separating them from a sizable drop below. In the distance, the skeleton of a ship sits motionless. It’s sails tied away, the decks and the rigging bare. Like a ghost ship. A cold feeling settles in the pit of both of their stomachs, though for the sake of false courage, neither mentioned it.

“No,” Yusuf responds, remembering Niccolo had asked him a question. “Never.”

* * *

_She takes across the country side on foot. She’s barefoot. The frost doesn’t bother her at first, but after the first mile it starts to sting like a hundred little needles poking at her heels. It hurts like hell. She curses it at first, then she laughs. If this is her punishment, it wouldn’t be enough. A light rain starts to fall. Misty and icy cold. She laughs harder._

_The farmer finds her on the side of the road choking around sobs. He draws his horses to a stop, and at first he think she’s a ghost. But she lifts her head and rakes a hand through knotted hair, wincing when her fingers catch a particularly big one.  
_

_“M-ma’am?” He calls. “Are you well?”  
_

_“Hardly,” she says and tries at a smile though it looks more like a grimace. “Are you heading towards London?”_

_“Oxford.”_

_“May I?” She says, motioning up towards the back of the cart._

_They ride along in silence a long while. The woman sits stock still and the farmer wills his nerves to settle back to a level that won’t have his hands slipping around the reins every time he coaxes the horses through a muddy patch.  
_

_Carefully, he asks if she has family in London._

_”No,” she replies. And then, as though in explanation, “I am looking for something.”_

_The silence stretches on after that._


End file.
